Echoes of Tattered Tongues: Memory Unfolded

Tuesday, July 24, 2018

I got a message from a friend Barbara Pauls with a post that tried to make the case that old age is a gift.

Is it?

I look at myself and I generally don't feel any different from when I was 60 or 50 or 40 or 30.

I can't say I'm the same way I was when I was 20 but that's probably a good thing as you'll see if you read my forthcoming collection of poems True Confessions (Darkhouse Books)?

But is old age a gift?

If it is, it gets to be less so as you move on. At least that's the way I see it from the people I saw aging.

My dad grew up on a farm and spent years in a concentration camp, and he was always working and laughing until his last years when he didn't have the strength to go into his garden and water the beautiful flowers he had planted in his home in Arizona.

My mom too felt her age. At the end, when she was in her 80s, she couldn't stand up out of her wheelchair, and she didn't have the hope that had fueled her in the concentration camps and in the US when we came her as refugees.

I'm sure that this isn't the way age hits all of us, but this is what I saw in the aging people I loved the most.

Anyway, I sent my facebook friend Barbara Pauls a note. I said that finally all we can hope for is that old age is a gift and it lets us feel that gift for us long as it will.

And I sent her a link to a poem I wrote for the Atticus Review about why we age. If you follow the link, you'll see the poem and you can hear me reading it in my not so old man's voice.

Sunday, July 15, 2018

They said the children would be useless in the camps in Germany. They were too young to do anything but cry for food.

I begged the soldiers to let me take them with me. I said I’d care for them and do the work for all of us. I even dropped on my knees and wept, clung to their boots, but they said no. I asked them who would feed them, and they said surely a neighbor would.

I couldn’t stop weeping, and they said if I didn’t, they would shoot the children.

Monday, July 2, 2018

I had gone out to mow the back terrace, a section of the yard that slopes down to the next street, and there was this deer there. I don't know if it was male or female, or how old it was.

There were lots of flies around its head, especially around its eyes. I think the flies were trying to get to whatever moisture was still there in the deer's eyes. I don't kow for sure.

It wasn't that big, but I didn't know how I was going to move it out of there. For a moment, I thought about just covering it with leaves and letting it rot down there. It was far enough from the house, and Linda and I didn't go down much to that part of the yard.

But then I thought I couldn't that. Linda's parents are coming later this week for a visit, and I bet they would want to walk around the backyard. The terraces there are beautiful. They are handmade, boarded by stone, and flowers whose names I don't know are everywhere.

So I knew I had to get the deer out of there. I grabbed its front legs and pulled it. It wasn't big but even a small deer weighs enough to slow a guy down, and I just turned 69. I got it up half way to the first of the three terraces, and I knew I couldn't drag it any further. I was covered with sweat by then, and the flies buzzing around the deer were all around me too.

So I walked to the shed up by the house, and I got the wheelbarrow and brought it down. It wasn't easy getting the deer in the wheelbarrow. Dead weight. You know what that means.

It was slow work but I managed it. I pushed the thing up the slope, up the terraces with their beautiful flowers.

It wasn't easy, but it wasn't hard either. The wheelbarrow was sort of balanced. The deer was small but it filled that wheelbarrow. The head and most of the neck, the front legs and the back legs -- all of that was outside, balancing the wheelbarrow so even an old man could push the thing and the dead deer in it up a slope to the street.

What did I think about as I pushed the thing up the hill?

Stupid things.

About Prometheus.

About Bill Stafford's poem about finding a dead deer on a road at night. About how the hell he was able to drag that deer off to the side of the road so nobody would run into it.

About another poem, William Carlos Williams' poem about how so much depends upon a wheelbarrow.

Stupid things.

Why did I think about them?

I thought about them, so I wouldn't have to think about this dead deer in my backyard and how she died and whether her dying would touch any one except me.

Wednesday, June 27, 2018

Before the war, my father imagined that he would always live in Poland according to the seasons and the holy days that came regularly like the ringing of church bells from the steeple of the small church in the village nearby.

A good Catholic boy, he loved going to the church on Holy Saturday to have the eggs and butter, the salt and bread blessed by the priest.

My father loved going early to church on Easter Sunday too, leaving the farm in the wagon even before the sun was a pink silence over the east, and coming to the church where the little girls stood in their white dresses holding lilies while the boys seemed serious and awkward in their older brothers’ suits.

And there was May Day when they pledged themselves to Mary, the mother of Jesus, and then Pentecost when he imagined the tongues burning above the heads of the apostles, and Christmas with its mysterious midnight mass that began in darkness and ended in light, and the feast of the three kings and more.

Thursday, June 21, 2018

I came here as a refugee in 1951. My first 3 years were spent in a refugee camp in Germany. My parents were put in the camp right after the war in 1945 -- after years in the German slave labor camps.

I don't have many memories of being in the refugee camps. My mom told me that one of my big fears was being separated from her. I needed to be with her all the time. One of my strongest memories in fact is discovering myself in a field next to our barracks building without my mom or dad near. I was weeping and angry and lost.

My parents heard me crying.

They had been talking to some other refugees in a building next to ours. They ran out and picked me and told to not to worry, they would never leave me.

About Me

I was born in a refugee camp in Germany after World War II, and came with my parents Jan and Tekla and my sister Donna to the United States as Displaced Persons in 1951. My Polish Catholic parents had been slave laborers in Nazi Germany. Growing up in the immigrant and DP neighborhoods around Humboldt Park in Chicago, I met Jewish hardware store clerks with Auschwitz tattoos on their wrists, Polish cavalry officers who still mourned for their dead horses, and women who walked from Siberia to Iran to escape the Russians. My poems try to remember them and their voices.
These poems have appeared in my chapbook Language of Mules and in both editions of Charles Fishman’s anthology of American poets on the Holocaust, Blood to Remember.
Since retiring from teaching American Literature in 2005, I've written two new books about my parents. My new poems about them appear in my books Lightning and Ashes (Steel Toe Books, 2007) and Third Winter of War: Buchenwald (Finishing Line Press).